Storage Allocation and Yard Crane Scheduling in a Maritime Terminal for Outbound Containers

摘要

This paper discusses the problem of storage allocation and yard crane scheduling for outbound containers in a maritime terminal. Outbound containers are first assigned to the storage yard after arriving at the terminal and then waiting to be loaded on the ship by yard cranes. The storage allocation is to assign each container to a storage location in the yard, and the yard crane scheduling is to dispatch yard cranes in the loading operations of these outbound containers so as to minimize the time to load all the containers on the ship. Two constraint programming models are developed to formulate the problem. The models' effectiveness is analysed by numerical experiments.